For many people, keeping track of numerous daily events scheduled for work and personal time is a requirement of daily life. As life grows more complex, so has the need for more advanced methods of keeping track of these scheduled events. Therefore, many people have turned from simple calendars and “pencil and paper” organizers to computerized scheduling programs offering greater functionality and portability.
Scheduling software applications residing on personal computers, personal digital assistants (“PDA”), and even mobile telephone handsets can help track and remind users of the myriad of scheduled events with which they are often confronted. Such software applications include, for example, Microsoft Corporation's Microsoft® Office Outlook® and IBM's Lotus Notes®. Other, similar, applications provide scheduling functionality for PDAs and mobile telephone handsets, although such applications are typically far more compact and have restricted functionality due to the processing constraints of the devices on which they operate.
Some of these scheduling applications are capable of reminding users of upcoming scheduled events by displaying a “pop-up” window or playing an audible tone at the time an event is scheduled to occur to alert the user of the event. However, such event reminders are typically limited to display of visual or audible alerts on the device on which the scheduling application resides. Therefore, the user must be close to the device in order to perceive the reminder alert.
Furthermore, existing scheduling applications cannot interact with communications services such as telephone, e-mail, and short message service (SMS) messaging, to provide reminder messages, or event alerts, to users and other intended recipients of the reminder messages. Nor do these applications provide user-definable interactions with the communications services.
In light of the foregoing, there is a need for methods and systems that provide additional types of alerts for scheduled events. Furthermore, there is an identified need for devices that interact with communications services in order to provide user-defined alerts that may be carried on different communications services available to a user. In addition, there is an identified need for devices that allow a user to interact with different communications services after receipt of a message alerting the user of a scheduled event.